But his point here is that if we’re willing to assign liability to PG&E for damages from a brushfire sparked tomorrow... if in your mind PG&E is truly responsible for any resulting death or destruction if a tree falls on their transmission lines during a time of critical fire risk and sparks a blaze.... then it is not only prudent, but it would be morally and economically imperative to shut down the lines during those critical risk periods.
There are several competing theories of liability and responsibility. Under strict liability, a fire happens, the root cause was an electrical spark, the utility is liable. You can’t operate a grid across all of California during 55mph winds at the end of the hot dry summer under those terms, and not go bankrupt.
From PG&E;
“California is one of the only states in the country in which courts have applied inverse condemnation to events caused by utility equipment. This means that if a utility’s equipment is found to have been a substantial cause of the damage in an event such as a wildfire – even if the utility has followed established inspection and safety rules – the utility may still be liable for property damages and attorneys’ fees associated with that event.”
There are a lot of variables in how damaging a wildfire may be. What sparked the fire is only one small variable in the chain of events. Forest management, building zones encroaching on forested areas, presence of fire brakes, disaster preparedness and response, emergency alerts all play a significant role, and those are just the factors CA can directly control. The weather, the climate is another matter.
“But for the spark” is a reductionist way to lay the blame for a multi-billion dollar fire. CA wildfires will burn every single year. The sparks are inevitable. The amount of preventative maintenance that theoretically can be done amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars.
It doesn’t serve CA’s common interest for electricity to cost $1/kWh. Risk mitigation is a statistical analysis, not an absolute. At some point you’ve invested enough that the risk is “mitigated” even if it isn’t “eliminated” and we accept this type of risk mitigation everywhere in modern life, the electrical grid should be no different.
How many people die driving on CA’s highways every year? How many could be saved with $100 billion of safety improvements? Do you shut them down until you can be certain no one else will die due to a deficient design or, perhaps, due to a gore point impact attenuator that hasn’t been reset?
A cursory look at PG&E financials shows that on ~$17b in revenue they spend ~$5b on supply and ~$7b on maintenance. They had been running $1-$1.5b surpluses the last few years. I wonder looking at other utilities how those ratios would stack up.
Would $1b more maintenance have prevented the Camp Fire? Entirely impossible to say. We do know that the full maintenance list runs into the $10s if not $100s of billions.